Golden Pheasant and Flower of Japanese Quince, from Pictorial Monograph of Birds (Shūchō gafu)

Golden Pheasant and Flower of Japanese Quince is one of the most vivid color plates in Numata Kashū's Shūchō gafu (1885), pairing the kinkeichō (golden pheasant, a Chinese species long acclimatized in East Asian gardens and prized for its extraordinary plumage) with the orange-red blossoms of boke (Japanese quince), a flowering shrub of late winter and early spring. The pairing exploits one of the great pictorial opportunities of kachō-e: a bird with brilliant gold, orange, and dark-green plumage set against a flowering plant whose blossoms run in a closely related color register, so that the entire composition becomes a meditation on the warm half of the spring palette. Kashū's drawing of the pheasant follows the long East Asian iconographic tradition that goes back to Song-dynasty bird painting, but with the kind of feather-structure observation that the Maruyama-Shijō shasei discipline had brought into Japanese painting practice. The plate is among the most-reproduced individual sheets from the album in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Dover and rawpixel editions, for understandable reasons: it is a virtuoso demonstration of what the high-end Tokyo color printing trade of 1885 could accomplish with multi-block registration.